ORLANDO – Information Builders has announced a new product designed to give businesses “a single pane of glass” for monitoring and running their applications.

Based in New York, the business intelligence company already has a product called iWay Service Manager, which is installed across its customers’ enterprise organizations to help them run their business processes.

On Tuesday, during its user summit, Information Builders unveiled a new product branded as iWay Sentinel, which will work with iWay Service Manager as a real-time monitoring tool. It will give businesses a web-based interface to let them see how all their applications are running across their organization, as well as to be able to manage them remotely.

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For example, iWay Sentinel can show users how resources are being used up across the entire system – that way, before a problem comes up in every instance of the application, they can nip it in the bud. The product also allows users to automatically script and schedule any management task, even after business hours, ensuring employees can avoid downtime and lost productivity during the work day.

iWay Sentinel allows organizations to detect failures in the server’s status, failures to transmit messages, or other performance issues. Using a customized algorithm, it can also compare the health of different servers, applications, and channels based on comparing them to each other.

And to save the IT department some extra work, iWay Sentinel can remotely start and stop servers, applications, and channels. Plus, as Information Builders is a business intelligence solutions provider, the product can show data about servers and applications through visualizations, or through drilling down into the numbers.

Still, iWay Sentinel’s potential isn’t meant to stop here. The tool may eventually play a bigger part in Information Builders’ strategy for the Internet of Things market, said Jake Freivald, vice-president of corporate marketing. He pointed to all of the devices that may be connected one day – our fridges, watches, phones, cars, and so on – and said all of that data will be collected.

“With the Internet of Things, you’ve got to have something that understands rules about what data should send, and where, and why,” said Freivald in an interview.

He added the idea for iWay Sentinel originally came from The Cheesecake Factory, a U.S. chain of restaurants. The customer wanted to be able to distribute an instance of iWay Service Manager to all of its locations, but the problem that came up was how the company could monitor all of those instances from one central location.

“Sentinel allows iWay to be a part of the Internet of Things, to be able to be distributed extremely widely and still manageable, both for the rules that it runs on, and the health of each individual service manager from a single pane of glass,” Freivald said.

“And I think that is not here yet, but over the course of a couple of years, that’s going to continue to develop.”

Going forward, the goal is to run iWay Sentinel with a few thousand instances, perhaps with stores and retail outlets, he added. The tool is currently only available in a controlled release form to iWay customers, but it will be made generally available in September.

Candice is a graduate of Carleton University and has worked in several newsrooms as a freelance reporter and intern, including the Edmonton Journal, the Ottawa Citizen, the Globe and Mail, and the Windsor Star. Candice is a dog lover and a coffee drinker.